


Ligur's Friend

by maniacalmole



Series: The Next Place [2]
Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: A Ghost Story, Gen, M/M, with a hint of the slowest of slow burns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2021-01-03 10:17:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 19,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21177779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maniacalmole/pseuds/maniacalmole
Summary: After his end that wasn't really his end, Ligur doesn't know what to do. Earth is too full of humans, but Hell isn't what he thought it was, either.In a remote village, full of suspicious people, Ligur finds a ghost. She haunts without aim or remorse. "Ah," Ligur thinks. "This might be someone I can relate to."





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> You should definitely read "The Next Place" before this one!
> 
> I watched a horror movie, and I got mad.
> 
> I came up with this version of Ligur before the TV show came out. This is why I describe him as a barely-human-shaped disaster instead of as a handsome man who just happens to have a lizard on his head, and also why I don’t MENTION the lizard, because of COURSE I’d include Lurky if I had known about him before!  
That being said, imagine whomever you like, I mean who am I to STOP you from imagining handsome lizard men?

There was a grime that grew on things that had sat still too long. A sort of conglomeration of grunge, a filth garden, that grew around things, formed from matter that surely one thought could not have been floating around in the air, yet it would gather every time, a spontaneous gunk. It would sit and molder and fester, decaying and growing at once, until—

Until you picked the thing up and gave it a good shake.

And then all that grime would slough off and fall into a disgusting pile on the ground.

That was Ligur.

He considered himself proudly to be what had formed, not from, but _around_ Heaven, when it had simply sat still too long. Too much of the same thing. Too right for too long. Something was bound to go wrong. There were the demons. There was Ligur.

Sloughed off onto the ground.

But sometimes, in that layer of gunk, something could start to grow.

New life took root in the strangest of places.

After his end that hadn’t turned out to be his end, Ligur had started to feel that something was changing. Something was amiss in the passing of endless time.

Something will grow in things that sit still too long. Even in the gunk. Something _new_.

It was what some of the humans lovingly liked to call ‘October’.

This should have been completely meaningless. It should have been made-up knowledge that passed Ligur by, like everything else they foolishly named, except Ligur liked October.

Humans went completely _mad_ in October.

Now, this wasn’t the United States. They weren’t going to _all_ dress up in a few weeks’ time in all manner of ways that would have made Heaven sweat, but there were still things going around in the good old UK that Ligur could make really interesting. There was something about the air this time of year. Humans liked to call it ‘crisp.’ Ligur knew better. Fall was about—_falling_. Fall was when everything was in decay. This year, there had been too much rain for anything to properly be called ‘crisp’, or even anything drier than ‘damp’. The smell in the air was _rot_.

The feeling in the cool autumn air wasn’t excitement. It was _unease_.

There was the sense that something was about to happen, and humans were kidding themselves if they thought they were optimists enough for this to make them happy. The days were getting shorter, the nights darker. It was perfect weather for skulking. Shadows stretched and people imagined all sorts of nasties hiding within them.

Ligur loved to help. They didn’t always have to _imagine_.

He had always done something special for Halloween. It had been his treat to himself, ever since he had first caught wind of the idea. A day meant for _scaring_. A day for when everything turned topsy-turvy and good was bad and ugly was best and everyone was rebelling from something, whether it was morality or the sheer appearance of it, and if that wasn’t a day meant for a demon like him, then Ligur didn’t know what was. He would participate. Oh, _he would join them_. If that was what they wanted, then for once in his life, he’d be only too pleased to oblige.

And the best part was, it wasn’t what they wanted at all. As always humans had no idea what they really wanted one bit. The fright of their lives? Good and bad to switch places? The dark forces unleashed upon the world for one spectacular night? Ligur could do exactly what they wanted and also give them everything they never wanted at all, he could be unfathomably cruel, unimaginably wicked, he could participate, on their own terms, and it would still be the worst thing they had ever witnessed.

That was what demons were meant to do.

For one night, he finally could live up to the image of a demon they had created for him, that they _expected_ of him.

At least, that had used to be the best part.

This year, he wasn’t so sure.

Ligur had found a small village with lots of history to skulk around in for the beginning of the month. He often went to this sort of place for inspiration. Away from the terrors of large numbers of people that lived in the city, village people had to make up their own. These were more the sorts of dark imaginings that Ligur felt he could fit. He was a country-demon, not a city one. Here, they imagined the shadows taking barely-human form and lurking in the night, waiting outside your window, ready to strike down anyone who went out past curfew, the old-fashioned horrors like claws and dead eyes and cackles and screams.

In the city, it was _people_ people feared most. The inner darkness of the human mind. Pfft. He’d leave that for the people themselves. And the city-demons. Like _Crowley_.

Flash bastard. 

Anyway, he’d get inspiration from this town just fine. You had to chip away at souls piece by piece, that was the finer sort of hellish temptation, no matter what _some_ demons might say.

It was a muddy little place. One street full of shops and then rooms all stuck together down a row that were supposed to count as separate living quarters if you really liked your neighbors or were really afraid of everyone else in the world. That’s why he supposed they did it. All this country, and the town stuck to itself like it was afraid of the monsters roaming around its edges. Except for the rich folk, who built their gigantic house down a road that was longer than the rest of the entire town. The village’s street was the perfect size for creating a wind tunnel that chilled you to your bone and made you think that this world was not really that far from the next.

Ligur had meant his own world. The underworld, and all the spirits that lived there.

Instead, the phrase _‘The veil is thinner here’_ popped into his head like a demon hiding behind a door waiting to spring out and say ‘_trick-and-treat!_’ at a poor unsuspecting human.

The ‘veil’. And what was behind it. Another world, but _not Hell_. The next one.

Ligur shuddered and pulled his coat* tighter around himself. He pushed his thoughts through it and continued down the road toward town.

*It was some sort of fabric, and he had it wrapped around what was presumably a human-shaped body. ‘Coat’ would have to do.

At any rate, when humans went around talking about pulling back the veil, they were usually referring to the one separating them from the creepy crawlies and all of Hell’s denizens, and he, Hell’s number one denizen, would be waiting for them. He just had to think of a _really good surprise_ to give them all this time round.

Earth wasn’t meant to have kept on going. There weren’t supposed to have been any more Halloweens. He supposed it wasn’t so bad that there were, now that he was here to participate in them. Not that he was gonna go being grateful for the likes of Crowley, but, well, when it came down to it, failure was another thing demons were supposed to be, so what was the harm in having failed yet another order? It seemed a good kind of failure, this one. Not like getting dropped into a boiling pit at all.

He shivered. That kind of thought was demon blasphemy. But he’d been supposedly dead for long enough that no one seemed to much care _what_ he was doing, even now he was back.

He reached the village pub, the only place that appeared to be open on that dreary day. He pushed through the door and made his way inside. It was just as cold in here as it had been outdoors, and nearly as drab. It was darker, too. The people, instead of looking warm and cheery, glared at him suspiciously, then turned back to sitting at their tables, hunched and silent. Ligur barely suppressed a grin. It was almost _too easy_. He sat down at a table by the wall and watched.

These were the kinds of places Heaven didn’t seem to know existed. Little villages that weren’t charming, but suspicious, reclusive, too tangled up in their own turmoil with each other to stop for a moment and consider helping someone else in the world. They didn’t deserve _saving_. That was what Hastur always said. Humans didn’t deserve saving. That had been the whole point, for him, for all this time. It hadn’t made much sense to Ligur, and he’d never quite wrapped his head around the concept of ‘_deserve’_ at all, to be honest, but it was what made Hastur so determined. Humans, he said, were just as wretched as they were. All they needed was a push to make them prove it.

The two of them had been _really good_ at providing that push.

Ligur chewed on the tip of his thumb. His eyes scanned the room for someone he could mess with. Someone who was just looking for a chance to break their life apart. There was always someone.

Hastur had always said, too, that the reason they needed that push, was not because they were inherently good, but because Heaven had always been pushing back from the other direction, and that wasn’t fair. Heaven never played fair, he said. The little glimpse of Heaven Ligur had seen recently in _that angel_ hadn’t seemed to be pushing very hard, but then again, he had been distracted whenever Ligur’d been watching him. He supposed Hastur was probably right. The rest of Heaven always had their agenda. Always had the Great Plan. Some sort of suspected end to it all.

And then it hadn’t.

Because of.

Ligur bit down on his thumb.

Because of _Crowley_.

Ligur didn’t like thinking of _past_ Crowley. The one before Ligur had annoyed him for ages in the limbo into the Next Place, whatever that was, because that one had turned out all right. Crowley _before_, _anything_ before, was like looking into a muddy mirror and being surprised at what you saw. It was like being made to think of what had happened. And then, as if thinking of what had happened wasn’t bad enough, it made him think of what was supposed to have happened next.

He didn’t know what that was.

He didn’t think this was it.

He chewed on his thumb and watched the people moving around in the pub.

A man was staring at the coins someone else had left on the bar. His hand was slowly inching toward them. Not much for him to do there, then. Another man and a woman were sitting very close together even though they were both married to someone else. Nothing particularly frightening there. Nothing _fun_. The boy who was supposed to go back to work after his lunch break was staying out late, hanging around here instead. Perhaps Ligur could scare him by pretending to be his conscience, preying off his guilt. Then again, pretending to be someone’s conscience didn’t sound like his cup of tea.

“She’ll regret it, in the end,” came a gruff voice from the booth behind him.

Ligur grinned. That was more like it. People doing things they were bound to regret was right up his alleyway. He squashed himself into the corner of his own booth and lurked with all his being. No one would notice him now.

He listened.

“If she _lives_ to regret it,” came another voice.

There was nothing particularly interesting about humans contemplating danger that might lead to their actual death. This was because, Ligur had discovered, practically _anything_ could lead to an actual death for a fragile human being. Sins led to it less than bravery and generosity. But the conversation had started off good, and he was already lurking, so he wasn’t about to leave now. Besides, humans were always being ridiculously grave over tiny matters. You couldn’t trust them to know what was up.

“The last one that went up there lived to tell the tale,” said a third voice. “But she packed up her ‘For Sale’ signs and was back in the city in a hurry, I can tell you. And she was one of the lucky ones.”

“Should close the place down,” said gruff voice. “Block it off. Burn it down.”

“_That’d_ please the spirit,” said the second voice, cruelly amused.

_Spirit_. A thrill went through Ligur, first at the thought of the possibility of a _haunting_, then at the remembrance of what he knew now, _the truth_. He knew what spirits were. He had been one.

Was there one here?

“Where would the spirit go?” The third voice sounded quieter now. They’d been mumbling before, but now they whispered. Humans were afraid when they whispered. This was no ghost story they were telling to amuse themselves or to scare off city folk. They _believed_. The voice said, “If the old manor burned?”

“She’d be gone,” said one of them, hopefully, disbelievingly.

“She’d probably burn the whole town down with her,” said gruff voice, decisively.

The old manor. The one on the edge of town. The path looked as though it hadn’t been driven or walked on in years. Ligur hadn’t given the building much of a glance—buildings weren’t good for much, to him, other than things for Hastur to burn down—but it hadn’t exactly looked new. A _haunting_. A spirit.

He’d been one once.

It was perfect, and then all of a sudden, it wasn’t.

Ligur lurched out of his seat. The people in the booths around him started and turned, frowning and staring, as though they had already forgotten that he had been there. They probably had. Sometimes he was _too_ good at lurking.

His fingers itched. He wished he were a human—not really, of course, not for a bit—just so that he would have a reason to steal something. Humans had it so easy, doing evil. Everything _mattered_ to them. It was so easy to mess something up.

Hastur kept popping into his head, as though he mattered. As though he were something that could be messed up, Ligur kept being bothered by this. Not because he didn’t want to think of him. Not because it made him feel odd. Normally, he’d be the one he’d call. He had always included Hastur in on his Halloween plans. Sometimes he waited until he had it all ready and then only added him in last-minute, so he could be surprised, too. But most of the time, they were in it together, out scheming and plotting away. Ligur could do a good scheme, but no one could _plot_ like Hastur. He had plotting in his blood.

Spirits.

He didn’t want to call Hastur. Not enough. Not even much.

Fact was, they hadn’t talked much lately. When they did it was the same as before. Or, not the same. Same words, but it felt different. Felt like less. It was supposed to feel like more, wasn’t it?

_You don’t want that_, his mind hissed. _You were never supposed to want that_.

Ligur scrunched up his nose. The patrons of the pub had gone back to eating in the conspicuously private way of people who were only pretending they weren’t paying attention to you. Ligur didn’t care. They could only stare at him so closely before their minds would wander, their awareness sliding off him like mildew off of a very wet rock. He paced towards the back, where there was a dart board covered in dust and a radio playing some sort of music, he supposed, and a great little corner in which there was nothing at all, until he stood in it, and then, for all intents and purposes, there was still nothing there, because the people who had been inconspicuously watching him now all went back to eating and drinking and staring sadly into their mugs for real, this time. The lurking stranger was forgotten, and he was alone with his thoughts.

Which was, he soon realized, entirely unbearable.

He glared at the radio.

Then, he grinned at it.

Making calls across the radio was as easy as making calls across a telephone. Easier, in fact, because you didn’t have to know how the buttons worked, or what numbers looked like in this part of the world, or which end you were supposed to talk into. It was just waves of sound and demonic interference.

Ligur made a call.

There were the sounds of a different song that he was interrupting on the other end. Ligur smirked and cleared his throat.

“_CROWLEY_.”

“_Uhm_.” The other voice was tiny and wavery. There was the noise of frantic adjusting of things, and then, in an attempt at a more ‘normal’ voice, which Ligur knew sounding nothing like the real Crowley at all, “Yes? Er, hello. This is—er, who is this? Might I ask?”

“_IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME_.”

“Yes, it has, er, been meaning to get in touch, ahm, lord—duke—uh—_who_ is this?”

“You idiot.”

The electronic sound of a harassed sigh carried across miles and miles of airwaves. “_Ligur_.”

“What’re you listenin’ to?” Ligur asked, grinning. He thought he recognized it. “Are you—you are! Hey, I’m the queen!”

“_Queen_, you’re not _the_ queen, technically you’re Freddie—and you’re not, you just—what do you _want_, Ligur?”

Ligur fiddled with the antenna for a moment, then smirked and said, “You haven’t checked in on us with your reports in a while.”

“My—wha—Ligur, you can’t be serious!”

Ligur cackled, and even over the sound, he could still hear Crowley groan through the crackling radio-waves. Ligur said, “I got you! Happy All Hallows’ Eve pranking!”

“It isn’t Halloween for weeks.”

“It comes earlier every year.”

“I should have known you’d be behind that.”

Crowley stopped talking, but there was the occasional sound from the other end, like things being shuffled around by someone who had just been very annoyed. Ligur tapped his fingers on the radio. He was probably creating some irritating white noise of his own, but it was more to let out restless energy than to do anything else. He’d called for a reason. He’d called for no reason at all. Crowley wasn’t talking. But he also hadn’t hung up.

Ligur said, “Is it always like this?”

“Is what?”

Ligur swallowed and hoped it hadn’t been audible. He said, “Once you get past the denial stage an’ all that. Once you—I dunno. Reach truth. It starts to not matter so much? After you say how you feel, you start to not feel it so much anymore?” He’d figured that was maybe why people were always saying to talk about your anger and sadness and grief, to let it out. He hadn’t known that once you let it out it didn’t come back again. The agonizing part was that he almost missed it.

Crowley was silent on the other end of the line. Then he said, “What d’you mean?”

“Nothin’,” Ligur said, voice jeering and cheerful and painfully bright in his own ears. “Just your typical holiday prank. The best prank of all, makin’ you think—”

“Ligur, I know how to tell when you’re lying.”

Ligur frowned at the tinny voice coming from the radio. “M’not.”

“Because you’re _always_ lying, so it’s a pretty easy thing to guess! You can tell me, Ligur. If there’s—if something’s wrong. Or if there’s just something you wanted to say. I don’t—Someone, I don’t know how to _talk_ to you, but if you really _need_ to—”

“Do shut up, Crowley,” Ligur said, and then he turned the radio off.

So there was that sorted.

Ligur sulked and huffed and stalked away.

After a night of standing in a wet field, and startling quite a few passersby who’d thought he was a scarecrow, Ligur had come back into the village, his mind made up. Almost. As made up a mind as someone like him could hope for.

The pub was too crowded today for him to successfully lurk inside. There was almost a jovial atmosphere in there. Outside, in the mud, there were a few stragglers, people who weren’t popular enough to be welcomed into the warmth. They scowled and jeered at him as he approached, and he scowled and jeered at them right back, and then he leaned against the wall on the opposite side of the door from them, almost one among them but not quite even then.

There was a horrid group of little children kicking something wet and not at all ball-shaped about. The point of the game seemed to be to keep the undesirable thing away from everyone else, so that you could keep it to yourself, which pretty much summed up humanity. Ligur watched them for a while, contemplating his next move on his Halloween scheme.

Hastur had a weird thing about the little ones. They set him on edge. Ligur didn’t much care. For his part, children were just innocent beings. Blank slate, kind of thing. They hadn’t had the chance to go and do anything really _good_ yet, so most of them were all right with him.

These ones looked like they were smudging up their blank slates with a good layer of grime and juvenile nastiness as quickly as they could, which was promising.

They had noticed him. The small ones were better at that. They stopped their game and stared, smirking like their older influences. One of them picked up the wet object contemplatively.

“If you throw that thing at me,” Ligur said happily, “I’ll stretch out your ears and tie them in nots round your snotty little heads.”

Two of them widened their eyes and scampered. Pity. But the third, a tiny one with a dress and one shoe, bared what few teeth she had at him and giggled in delight.

“That’s right,” he said to her. “And if you keep on this path, and don’t listen to the nasty things your parents say, you’ll get to go to a place where all sorts of horrible things happen. You’ll love it. Now tell me. What’s this about a ghost?”

“She screams an’ howls an’ stuff!”

“Ooh,” Ligur said. “What then?”

“An’ she disappears and re’pears, an’ then people go missing!”

“And they don’t come back?”

“No! No, an’—” She thought about it. Ligur was pleased to see she was taking this all very seriously. “And auntie says she’s an evil speert, an’ they don’ talk about her when I’m there, but I _know_, cause I listened, an’ she’s really dead, only she’s a ghost now, so—so she’s a ghost now!”

“Excellent,” Ligur said. If adults were talking about it when the children weren’t around, that was a good sign it was real.

“An’ that’s why no one can go to the big house,” the girl continued, “’cause the rich lady who lived there’s a ghost now, so we can’t go there.” Then she gave him an appraising look. “What sorts of horrible things?”

Ligur opened his mouth to reply. But something ticked in the back of his head. Suddenly he was washed over with a brief shadow of the centuries of pain and the realization that he’d mistakenly had all too recently that _maybe it was not a good thing to be like him_.

His grin fell away. He scowled at her.

She noticed the difference at once. The small ones were good at seeing him, and they were also best at seeing when he _really meant it_. Even better than Crowley. Certainly better than Hastur.

“Go away,” he said, “and never tell anyone that you’ve seen me.”

She bit her thumb and turned and ran, and Ligur stomped in the other direction, towards the house down the long, long path.

The house was not only down a long path leading out of town, which twisted and wound through what was probably the only swamp in that part of the country. It was also on the top of a hill. The house was grand and tall and leaning, with points and loose shingles and half-open windows that hung loosely from its walls, and all sorts of other things that haunted houses needed to have. It was from that period and made in that style that always seemed to lead to someone dying horribly inside of it. Ligur didn’t know much about houses, except to recognize precisely these signs.

He trudged up the harsh slope towards the gated garden. The ground was starting to get soggy and marsh-like. Ligur supposed that was all good and well if you were a ghost, and he even admired it a little, something that would make humans struggle while causing your incorporeal form no extra sweat whatsoever and also matching your rotting ghostly aesthetic to a T. But when he had to trudge around in a humanish body, he wasn’t as big a fan. _Don’t get me wrong_, he thought. He was plenty happy to be adding a new layer of sludge to his boots and coat—that was his favorite type of souvenir. It was just that by the time he reached the top of the hill, he was bloody exhausted.

The gate was tall and black and iron, yet it didn’t look heavy. It was curved into the exact sort of insubstantial design that made it clear that this was a border to be respected, not due to any physical boundary, but because it was forbidding in the sense of large amounts of money, class lines that couldn’t be crossed, and also, though perhaps Ligur only saw this because of his own unique experience, it was an insubstantial yet foreboding boundary between worlds. Once crossed, things would start to be mixed.

He almost turned back.

It didn’t matter, anyway. Z and their cohorts weren’t looking for him now. They wouldn’t be roaming around in their dreadful excuse for a world, watching what he was doing. _Lurking_. That wasn’t their style. Instead of watching you when you weren’t expecting it, they left you alone, truly alone, and didn’t care what you did. It should have been exactly what Ligur had been looking for.

_They’re not here_, he thought, and he sniffed and walked stiffly on.

He touched the gate, and it swung open instantly. Too far and too smoothly to be natural, and away from him, though the gate was leaning at an angle down the hill and moving in that direction defied the laws of gravity.

“Eerie, I’ll give you that,” Ligur said. “But don’t you think it’s maybe a little too welcoming, openin’ up like that for people?”

He walked through the gate and headed down the path towards the old house.

“Then again, I s’pose welcoming humans into a trap’s what you want, really.”

The path to the house was surrounded on both sides by the twisting and creeping plants that had once most likely been a majestic garden. They were overflowing and shrunken at the same time. Vines with thorns that had once been brimming with life and had completely taken over had now succumbed to their demise. Everything was crackling and brown and suffocating, overgrown and dead at once. Life and death, the two most disturbing things of all.

Ligur waited for a moment in the garden. It was as good a place to haunt as any. He could sense aloneness and presence all at once. He wasn’t sure which was stemming from him. If the ghost were to appear here, he wasn’t sure yet what he’d say to her. Probably just laugh. Pull a face. Revel in the fact that he’d finally met someone he couldn’t make more miserable than they already were.

No spirits appeared, but the feeling of being watched grew. Ligur knew all about this, but usually he was the one doing the watching. There was a breeze, and the rustling noise that could have been dead leaves of plants, or wings. He shivered.

He walked up to the manor’s door, pushed it open with the strength of someone who simply didn’t care for locks or rotting wood or weight, and walked inside.

There were, of course, many places he could go. He thought he’d leave the bedrooms, attics, nurseries, rooms filled with dolls, and rooms where people had been secretly trapped for decades for later. It wasn’t every day you stumbled across a place as clearly wretched and haunting as this, and he wanted to savor it. If he couldn’t find the ghost downstairs, then he would risk the treacherous rotting steps and go up higher.

Instead, he moved past the entrance hallway and made his way into the first room on the ground floor.

It was one of those rooms he’d never seen the purpose of. Sitting, or something. It was grand and decorated and worse than abandoned. Abandoned places looked fairly clean. This one was a wreck. This place had been abandoned _deliberately_. Things were strewn about across the many tables, cabinets, and sofas and chairs in a grotesque exaggeration of the fact that life had once been lived here, and wasn’t being lived here anymore.

Ligur crept amidst the wreckage.

So many _things_. Humans always liked so many things. Pillows and papers and candles and books. Old cups of tea left to go cold, past cold. But once this place had been full of life. It reminded him of someplace he’d seen, although at first he couldn’t imagine why he would ever go anywhere like this. This place looked like an exaggeration, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d seen the real thing once before. There were a ridiculous number of sources of light that could have been turned on, had there been any reason for them.

“I almost like it in here,” Ligur said, running a finger through the sticky conglomeration of cobweb and dust that clung to a lamp. “Chaotic. Disgustin’. ‘Cept, it’s too much like that place.” It had hit him at last. Not while he was alive, but _after_. One of the very places he had used to haunt. Underneath it all, warm colors and soft fabrics and lots of little knick-knacks that had probably been collected for _something_, probably because they had _emotions_ and _memories_ attached. Things like this, little porcelain children with dogs and doilies and tiny portraits of simpering ladies and gentlemen and letters, lots of love letters, would have looked creepy, under all that dust and the passage of time, forgotten but unable to move on, suspended in time by some malicious force, once you knew the context, oh yes, then it was horribly unnerving. Unless you had another context stuck in mind. And when he’d been in that other place, it’d never been alone, but always with that angel there, or Crowley, who somehow, against all odds, managed to make it all seem more alive.

“You’ve got a great aesthetic,” Ligur carried on, eyes roaming over cluttered surfaces and plush sofas that hadn’t been sat on in decades, still littered with blankets and shawls that would never be worn again, emblems of a life lived alone and cold and forgotten. “Except I can’t stop thinking of that _bloody_ bookshop. Cause there, see, it’s not forgotten, lost things, but _preserved_. And it’s not forgotten. And it’s not—all—alone.”

He upset one of the blankets on the couch, and the air became polluted, making him cough. “There’s plenty of dust there, too,” he said, “only not like this. That’s one thing you have got on him. This is _haunting_ dust. The dust of the dead. Much better, that.”

Something began to sing. He turned, looking for the source of the tinkling little noise, and found one of the porcelain figurines. It was of a man and a woman, smiling at each other with mouths that had been painted far too red, holding each other and spinning around inside of a little gazebo. It was a music box. Something had set it off.

He grinned. “That’s more like it,” he said. “Goosebumps, that gave me! You’re doing a great job.”

He roamed around the room, waiting for more things to be set off. They weren’t, but once the music box had ended its song, cut halfway through a line with a horrible grinding sound, its melody seemed to linger in the air. The dust motes looked alive. And yet, he was the only living thing there. Utterly alone.

_Not alone._

He saw something that made his pulse quicken. A mirror. It hung across from him on the far other side of the room. He hurried towards it, bumping against low tables and the corners of chairs on his way. There was a crack along one side of the glass that made its reflection distorted, and the other half was coated in dust. Ligur could only see the suggestion of a shape in it that must have been himself, although, granted, that was usually more or less what he looked like, anyway. He pulled his sleeve down over his hand and wiped the glass.

He peered into it. He saw his face. He looked behind his shoulder. Something was there. _Something was there_.

He turned around.

He saw her.

For a moment, neither of them moved. Ligur caught himself wondering why she didn’t move to kill him right away. Surely that was what ghosts were supposed to do? Then he remembered, this was not the ghost from a horror movie. This was a real one, like him, or like he had been. A human dead so long she had probably forgotten her own name.

She hovered, grey and silent, like a smudge on a photograph that wouldn’t take form no matter how long you stared at it, yet you knew had a form anyway. It appeared when you closed your eyes to blink.

Ligur blinked.

She was right in front of him.

“H—” Ligur said.

The woman shifted, stretched her mouth, let out a horrible scream. It built up like a train approaching, faster and faster, shaking the walls, rattling the glass of the windows. A great wind built from it and blew so hard that it stung Ligur’s face. He almost had to close his eyes. He didn’t.

The scream stopped. The woman and the demon stared at each other, face to face.

Ligur grinned.

The spirit stared.

Ligur said, “_Hello_.”


	2. Chapter 2

Ligur went back to see the ghost the next day.

She had vanished abruptly as soon as he’d spoken to her the first time. He’d tried everything, shaking all the carpets and rugs, setting off all the music boxes, but nothing would coax her back out. He supposed she probably had been expecting him to be scared, and hadn’t known what to do when he wasn’t. Or maybe she sensed that he wasn’t human.

Or maybe she sensed that he had once been like her.

Ligur was practically dancing—though not the way demons normally dance—as he made his way into the suffocating sitting room once again, the next day. He wasn’t even sure why he was so delighted to find a ghost. Maybe because that scream had been the best conversation he’d had in weeks.

“Hulloo,” he said into the echoing chamber. He _thought_ it was a chamber. _Looked_ like a chamber. The kind of room that was too fancy to be just a ‘room’. “Anyone here?”

An ever-so-slight chill breeze blew through the house. The windows had all been blown open at some point in the past, probably a ghostly tantrum, but the breeze still felt unnatural. Ligur grinned.

“I haven’t come,” he said, “to be murdered. Sorry to let you down. Used to not mind it, bein’ murdered, only that was just the mortal part, not the immortal part. Once the immortal bit’s been done, well, it all’s kind of downhill from there. No offense, but I’ve prob’ly been murdered more grotesquely than even you could manage, so you might as well quit while you’re ahead.”

Now the air grew still. Once more it felt intentional. Heavy. Almost like someone was listening.

“That’s right,” Ligur said softly. He walked slowly through the room, each step hesitant, respectful, almost. “I’ve been the same as you. An’ no, I can’t bring you back. Not that you’d want to come back. Trust me, there’s nothin’ here for you, not now you’ve been there so long. Nothin’ here for humans. Not now you know the truth. Dismal in life an’ death an’ all.”

He swept his hand along the edge of a dusty table. He rubbed the thick fluff of it between his fingers. Then he brightened.

“But the good news is, I’m not here to exorcise you or anything, either. I’m just—” He frowned. What was he doing? “I’m just looking for—someone who _understands_.”

It was an icky, human thing, understanding. But only when you meant it in the open-up-your-heart, compassion kind of way. This dead woman wouldn’t understand his heart. She’d understand the emptiness where it was meant to be. This kind of understanding was violence.

“It’s too hard, tryin’ to explain it to the others.” He sniffed. “Even Hastur doesn’t get it. How long everything is. How once you reach the edge of existence, you’re lookin’ out over a cliff at a whole lot of nothing.”

Ligur sat upon the table. “So what do you do? You scream.” He grinned into the dust motes. “You scream and scream. I wish I could scream like you do. That’s one thing humans got. I ‘spect it’s cause you’ve got farther to fall. Starting from Hell, the dim reality of existence isn’t really even that much of a disappointment. But to you, it’s a _horror_.” He said jealously, “I’d like to live a life of horrors.”

The air was simply cold now. Horribly, pleasantly cold. To a demon, it was the same as it would feel for a human to be wrapped in a warm blanket. It felt comforting. Welcoming. Hostile in a friendly sort of way, the way that meant the welcomer saw the same kind of world that you did.

“So tell me,” Ligur asked, leaning back to look up at the high ceiling. “Why’d you end up here? Instead of Up or Down? What scared you so much, killed you so bad, that you ended up trapped in this place?” He looked around the house where it must have happened, her death. Something tragic. Something frightening. He much preferred the latter. “And now you haunt it. Don’t ever let it go, miss ghastly. A place to haunt. Something that’s yours to scream at and love and hate.” He frowned. He didn’t even know what he was saying now, just saying it. “Gotta keep something in your claws,” he said. “Everything else disappears, anyway.”

He thought he heard humming. Subtly, he slid off of the table and started to walk towards the noise, keeping his head turned away from it, as though he were only looking around more. The pictures and portraits around the room didn’t interest him. He didn’t care who this woman was. Perhaps that was it. She was no one, now. She was like he was. Outside of existence. Forgotten and therefore finally free.

“All I want to do,” Ligur said, slowly, soothingly, dangerously, “is talk.”

His eye fell upon the mirror he had approached the day before. A shape flashed in and out of it, like the blink of an eye.

Ligur approached the mirror.

“And you can talk to me,” he said. “Devil-to-devil. What d’you think of the world, now that you’re out of it? What do you think of nothing? Of emptiness? You might as well talk to me. I know I’m better company than anyone else you’ve got in there.”

He stopped in front of the mirror and looked at his face. He scowled. He looked above his right shoulder. All he could see was the scratched mirror-version of the room behind him.

From the other side of the mirror, a darker shape appeared, sudden and undeniable, and something heavy fell on his shoulder.

Ligur screamed.

“Spawn of Satan! That was good! That one was really good, I’ll give you that!”

“What are you doing here?” a voice exclaimed.

“Wait, are you—are you human?” Ligur spat. “Are you bloody human? Oh, bloody hell—”

“Yes, I’m human.” The woman, and human woman it was, took her hand off of his shoulder and put it on her hip. “Look at me, I’m solid, you daft thing.”

Ligur was about to point out that you didn’t have to be human to be solid, nor did you have to be solid to be human, for that matter, although he suspected that by ‘human’ this woman had meant alive and not currently undergoing experiments somewhere very south of here, but she continued speaking before he could find the way to explain it to her.

“Now, you just get on out of here.” She had a frizzed and yet stalwart, unshakable look about her, and her voice was as sturdy as her build. Her cropped-short grey hair stuck out in soft spikes into the dusty air of the room, and she looked old enough to be some sort of witch-like hag, yet her tanned face, bright eyes, and no-nonsense expression made it clear that she wouldn’t stand one minute for you suggesting any such thing. “You’ve no business messing about in haunted houses.”

“_I’ve_ no business?” Ligur cackled. “I’m better off doing it than you are, believe me.”

“See here, I’ve been dealing with ghosts since long before you were—”

She stopped speaking abruptly. She was giving him the kind of stare that humans gave him whenever they tried to look at him more closely and deduce something about him based upon his appearance. Ligur’s _appearance_ was a shaky thing. He certainly did not look his age. He also did not look like any age that any human had ever been. Her eyes got a glossed over look. He shook his hand in front of her face to snap her out of it.

“What are _you_ doing here? It’s right creepy, snooping around in haunted houses like that,” Ligur said. He eyed her. “You’re dressed like you could be the gardener, or spooky housekeeper who tries to scare everyone away, only you’re too loud for that.”

She glared daggers at him with her icy blue eyes. “Folk round here says there’s a ghost,” she said. “I’m here to deal with it.”

“_Deal_ with it.” Ligur was taken aback for a moment. Then he remembered how very stupid humans were, and it all made sense. “You want to _ghost hunt_ this thing?” She was making the whole house feel more earthly. Dust just looked like dust in her presence. Ligur was displeased.

“I’m no hunter,” the woman grunted. “Name’s Grimshaw. I’ve done this for a long time. Many a ghost I’ve seen to their rest. Don’t you worry about this house anymore. Don’t you come around here meddling, neither. Either you’re a skeptic, which makes you even more of a target, or you’re just an idiot, which is bad enough. Trust me. It’s not safe, but I’ll handle it.”

“_I_ will handle it,” Ligur said, although he certainly hadn’t planned on putting the ghost to her rest. “Trust me. Or.” He made a sour face. “Don’t do that. Just don’t bother me. Don’t get in my way.”

“Look, we both want the same thing—”

“I’m not one for ‘working together’ and all that dribble,” he said.

“Lucky for you, because neither am I, so you can just go on home.”

“Hah. Likely.” Ligur firmly did not have a _home_.

Grimshaw frowned at him. She was almost as good at it as he was, although her frown was less the disturbing-type, and much more the no-argument type. She looked made of rock. “Don’t make me call the authorities.”

“There is no authority here,” Ligur scoffed. It wasn’t entirely true. Technically, Satan was an authority over him. Technically, Z was an authority over the ghost. The thought of them made his spine crawl. He bared his teeth at the human.

She seemed almost impressed—not by his teeth, but by his earlier statement. “I s’pose you’re right,” she said thoughtfully. “This is a godless place. Nevertheless, I’m here to take care of it. I said I’d help the people in this town, thankless though they’ll be, and I’m going to do it. Not to mention the specter herself.” She squinted and started waving something through the air. It was some sort of object. Ligur couldn’t be bothered to look at it more closely than that.

“You can’t help her,” he said. “Nothin’ can save a ghost.” Except maybe whatever it was that Crowley and Aziraphale’d had in them, to make them fight so hard that Z finally freed them. And partly whatever Hastur’d had. He and Hastur. Ligur shuddered.

“I expect,” Grimshaw said, now closely examining the pictures on the walls, “it was probably this woman here.” She poked her finger at one of the figures, a woman standing next to another, a man behind them. “Lord, but she’s got a fire in her eyes, even then. Siblings, they said. Never did get along, until one day—”

“Just stay here long enough, and you’ll know for sure.”

The woman blinked at him.

Ligur gave his best unalluring grin. “She’s killed people, you know.”

Grimshaw put away the object. She put her fists on her wide hips and gave him a look. “I _do_ know. That’s why I’m here.”

“Does it bother you?” Ligur said. “The idea that you’re helping a murderer?”

The woman gave a huff and went back about her business. “It’s not my business whether anyone’s good or bad. I just try to stop all the screaming and carryin’-on. Doesn’t need to be Casper the Friendly Ghost for me to put her to rest. Don’t need to be angels in the town for me to save them, either.”

Ligur wrinkled his nose. “You wouldn’t like angels as much as you’d think.”

Grimshaw gave a hearty laugh. “You might not make such bad company, you know. But it’s still too dangerous. Get out of here, and leave the ghost to me. Trust me, it’s better this way.”

Ligur snorted, but it was clear this woman wasn’t going to leave easily, and he doubted the specter would show up after she’d been poking around. He might as well try again tomorrow, or during one of the many hours of the night that humans gave up by default. He hunched his shoulders and slouched away, whispering under his breath to the ghost as he went, “_I _know rest is the last thing you want. Stuck in that lifeless place. But you and I, we can show the world what restless spirit _means_.”


	3. Chapter 3

Ligur sat hunched on the arm of the haunted mansion’s sofa. He didn’t understand the normal way of sitting on couches. Weren’t humans low enough in the world that they should feel uncomfortable lowering themselves further into the depths of something soft and cushy? He didn’t, however, _sprawl_. He wasn’t showy, like _Crowley_. He certainly didn’t make himself _comfortable_ by _lounging_. He hunched, and he hunched, now, on the sofa’s arm, just because he had planned on being here for a long time, and even he needed to give his lurking a rest every now and then.

But the ghost, surprising him, had turned up quickly, and they had been having a one-sided conversation for a while now, and Ligur was less hunched and more relaxed and closer to ‘comfortable’ than he had been in a long time as he drawled on about the world and what the ghost wasn’t missing in it.

“I mean, you might _think_ you miss things, but you don’t, really.” He held out a hand, palm-up. “What was there to life? I mean, what really? You talked to people, but do you miss it? You did stuff you were s’posed to do, but I mean, really, do you miss it?”

The ghost hovered, feet just a bit above the ground. Her form was misty grey, but her eyes were black. They looked, vacant, at Ligur. Vacant eyes were, paradoxically, full of something, he thought. Full of whatever he’d been feeling ever since he’d gotten back to Earth and life. Emptiness was the fullest thing of all.

“Don’t talk much anyway, do you?” Ligur said.

The ghost tilted her head. It was more of a response than he’d gotten so far. She wasn’t hiding from him this time, either, which he also counted as progress.

“S’not bad, talkin’ to you,” Ligur sniffed. “I can talk to you about anything, cause nothin’ means anything to you anymore.” There was no judgment of what they should or shouldn’t be thinking. No enjoying, or anything to squash. Just blank eyes. “Cause you’re no part of the world. Nothin’ matters to you.” Just like him.

The ghost’s mouth stretched into a humorless grin and she let out a cackle. Ligur understood. He hadn’t said anything funny. That was why she was laughing. When you’d seen the end, the only time you could allow yourself to laugh was when nothing was funny at all. Otherwise it just felt cheap.

“So tell me,” he said, grinning for real. He was a demon of Hell, and, bless it, he could afford to be cheap. “What kind of hauntings are your favorite?”

The ghost lady tilted her head.

“We know you like a good bloodcurdling scream,” Ligur said. “But do you do any of that other stuff? Manifestin’ blood or extoplasm or whatsit?” He scooched forward on the seat and let his grin get nastier. “If you like, I could bring you some stupid humans up here for you to spook. All Hallows’ Eve is just around the corner. You an’ me, we could do it _right_.”

The ghost’s head jerked—she glanced behind Ligur, towards the entrance hall. Ligur’s face drooped.

“All right, all right, I won’t bring anyone else here if you don’ want. Just thought it’d be funny.”

The ghost’s face looked cracked. It was stretched, lines appearing in it. There was something bubbling up behind her vacant black eyes.

Rage.

The ghost screamed.

Ligur held out an arm in front of his face, reflexively, an instinct of self-defense that he never could quite shake.

The ghost flickered and disappeared.

The demon heard a voice from behind him.

“How—did you _do_ that?”

Ligur spun around, stumbling off the sofa, and pointed a nasty fingernail at Grimshaw. “_You_. You bloody—you scared her off!”

Grimshaw’s face was pale. Her mouth was hanging open as she stared at the space once held by the specter. “She was there—just hoverin’ there—like anything. Just _lookin’_ at you.”

“Well, not scared,” Ligur mused. “Prob’ly just _annoyed_ her off.”

“I’ve never seen a spirit behave like that.” She sounded as though she were in awe.

“You’ve never seen a ghost who hadn’t seen _your_ face first. Faced with that, who wouldn’t leave at the sight of it?”

“Like yours is better,” the woman snapped. Her eyes were still squinting at the empty space where the spectral figure had been. She tore them, reluctantly, to meet Ligur’s eye. “She just—_stayed_.”

“Not anymore.”

“How’d you do that?”

“You’ve never seen a ghost with _me_,” Ligur huffed. “Figures, I could talk to ‘em better’n you could. I’m not askin’ for things like for them to return to their _‘eternal peace’_. Like a bloody ghost door-to-door salesman, you are.”

The woman finally looked irritated enough to pay him some attention. “Why were you talking to the ghost?” she snapped. “I talk to ‘em, but only to get ‘em to tell me what’s wrong. Unfinished business. What they need. That sort of thing. I don’t converse with them.”

“How much did you hear?” Ligur said, peering at her from the corner of his eye.

The woman pulled herself up tall and huffed. “I don’t make a habit o’ listenin’ in on others’ business.” She said it in a way that made it seem like an annoying thing, even though supposedly it was a virtue.

“Then how d’you know I wasn’t askin’ her her unfinished business and whatnot?”

“You can’t just ask. You have to coax it out of them, gentle-like. You don’t seem like the sort who’d know how to say a gentle word if his life depended on it.”

Ligur relaxed. At least she wasn’t all bad.

“Anyway.” Grimshaw marched through the room, as though she had a right to be there. She inspected the air. She took out yet another Thing and waved it around. “Very unusual behavior for a ghost. Might be a tough one, this lady.”

“Yeah. Might not be _chatty_, like your other ghosts.”

The woman ignored him and continued her search of the room. Ligur looked on disapprovingly. He didn’t know if he admired her utter lack of caring that he was there, or was annoyed at her for not being more bothered by his infernal presence. Maybe he’d started lurking without realizing it. He followed her around a few paces behind her, mocking her serious expression, hands held gravely behind his back.

The woman’s Thing started beeping. She stood up and stopped, smiling, satisfied, in front of the portrait she had been looking at the last time she’d been there. “A-_ha!_” She jabbed a finger at it. “I didn’t spend these past few days doing nothing, you know. You see this man here?”

Ligur didn’t respond. He widened his eyes. He said, finally, “Talking to yourself?”

“I’m talking to _you_, you daft boy.”

“And what makes you so sure I’m yet another human here?” Ligur said. “I could be a ghost, too.”

“Smelling like that?” Grimshaw mumbled.

Ligur snickered.

“As I was saying.” She pointed back at the portrait. “This man—I thought he was the brother—two sisters, after all, I already knew. But no. _This man_. His name was Acton. Became this woman’s wife.”

She was pointing at one of the women in the picture. She turned to him and raised her eyebrows significantly. Ligur shrugged.

“_This_,” she said, pointing to the _other_ woman, “is the specter.”

Ligur peered at the portrait and ‘_hmm’_-ed.

“The woman you were just speaking to?” Grimshaw exclaimed.

Ligur shrugged.

“You don’t recognize her?”

“I din’t look at her face, much.”

“You didn’t—” The woman put a hand to her brow and sighed. “Never mind. At any rate. You must see what I’m getting at. Even the most reclusive, never-talk-to-another-livin’-being person must know what I’m saying.”

Ligur gave her a lazy look.

“They were in _love_.”

Ligur gave her a disgusted, disappointed look.

“Laetitia—that was the sister’s name—married the man, Acton. But in the village—the whole village knew that Elizabeth was completely _taken_ with him, too.”

“Eugh!”

“What’s the matter with you now?”

Ligur crossed his arms and turned away. “You gave the ghost a name.”

“I didn’t—she already had a name.”

“You didn’t have to go sayin’ it.”

“Fat lot of good it does, talkin’ to you.” Grimshaw sniffed and turned back to the painting, ignoring him once more. She still spoke to herself, though. “Love. What it does to people. Well, Miss Lizzie. We’ve got your unfinished business. But how to resolve it?”

“Love isn’t business.”

Grimshaw turned to him sharply. Ligur hadn’t been expecting it. She gave him a curious look. “Now, why d’you say that?”

Ligur shrugged. “Dunno. Love isn’t—isn’t—look, I don’t know nothing about it. Why’re you asking me?”

Grimshaw sighed. “I’ve never been an expert, either. But I’ve done my share of fixin’ love stories in the putting-spirits-to-rest business. Can’t avoid it, then. Love always seems to be the thing that keeps ‘em going.”

Ligur snorted. He choked. He scowled and turned away.

“But how to help you?” Grimshaw stroked her chin as she regarded the portrait, two women, one with fire in her eyes, soon to be snuffed out forever. “How to fix this?”

“You won’t,” Ligur said. He was shuffling out of the room. “You never will.”

“I’ll find a way,” Grimshaw said, determined.

Ligur, as he left, grumbled, “No, you won’t.”


	4. Chapter 4

There were plenty of things a demon could do to secure souls for their master in that village.

Ligur hadn’t been to Hell in a while. That didn’t mean he’d forgotten what he was. He would never forget that. He simply hadn’t gone back Down, back to his dukedom, which was a much more solitary place than anything by the same name up here on Earth. Demons didn’t have societies. Communities, even less so. Besides, they’d all thought he was dead. All except Hastur had accepted it.

He hadn’t gone back in a while, and he doubted he’d be missed.

Still, he was a demon, and he was beginning to think he could do much more for Hell up here than down amidst the flames anyway. Humans could always do with a bit more rot in their souls, especially since the demon who’d been _supposed_ to be the main source of evil temptation on Earth hadn’t been doing his job properly in Satan-knew how long.

Ligur went looking for souls to haunt.

Because he, unlike Crowley, hadn’t gone completely averse to the rest of his own kind, he hadn’t turned his back on everything they held dear—or whatever the demon equivalent of ‘dear’ was. ‘Loathsome’, perhaps. There were plenty of people here with one foot in the Sulphur already. Trouble was, he couldn’t pick one out and stick with it.

Ligur’d used to enjoy the craft involved in choosing one person and working away at them, slowly, over years sometimes, until they completely decayed. It was fascinating, like a puzzle, seeing what it would take to make them give up all hope of the light and fall into the darkness that always lay within. Now he couldn’t fathom how he’d stayed around one person, one human, for so much time. It was so personal. He’d actually, somehow, watched their lives, and now he couldn’t handle the thought. He hated people. The last thing he wanted was to know them.

He was starting to see more of a bright side to Crowley’s methods of spreading mass sin and anger through dozens or hundreds of humans at once. He hated the fact, but he did see it. Couldn’t help it. The snake was like a pox.

He had ordered all the chips at the pub. Not to eat them. He sat at his grungy little table, baskets of chips surrounding him, and grinned. The other patrons of the pub growled at their own grungy tables, under their breaths, but almost as loudly as their stomachs. The murderous thoughts ringing through the air were almost palpable.

Ligur was almost feeling like himself again, but he couldn’t help listening in on a conversation one growling table was having nearby. They were growling about someone other than him, and he didn’t like it.

“She’s been down by the old graveyard, now.”

Ligur poked around in the chips in front of him and eavesdropped, in spite of himself.

“The old bag’s bound to get what’s comin’ to her, soon enough.”

“As if they’d’ve buried _her_ in the old graveyard,” another voice scoffed.

Ligur knew they were talking about Grimshaw, and the ghost. He’d heard the villagers talk about them both plenty. Well, the woman plenty. They only mentioned the ghost in even more hushed whispers, and only briefly. They really were afraid. They were quite certain that Grimshaw was going to end up dead. They didn’t seem to mind.

“Will they ever stop coming?” said a new voice. It sounded younger, but perhaps that was only the note of concern it held. “Will they never learn, and leave that house alone?”

“They’ll stop, eventually. They’ll forget for a while. Until someone gets greedy again, or just bloody stupid, and thinks they can face her all by themself.”

They hushed, as they did, whenever they mentioned the ghost directly, even by pronoun.

“They’ll forget it first, though, for a while, once this one’s gone. Somethin’ about that house. Makes people forget it.”

“Thank goodness for that.”

Ligur knew he could do some work on that younger voice, if he wanted to. The others would be a bore. But the young one, with concern, and hope, and fear. She’d be a soul worth collecting.

He shoved his chips across the table away from him, slid out of the booth, and stomped through the pub and out the door.

Outside, the air was chilly. Halloween was only a little over a week away. The ground was properly sludgy, the air biting at your bones, making existence painful. Everything was perfect.

Ligur headed for the house.

Inside the mansion, the air, cool from the haunting, almost seemed warm in comparison to the outdoors. It was cold in the way lifeless things were, the still chill of death. There was nothing to make you feel alive in it, not even anything to make you feel your life aching to continue in spite of nearing its end. This coldness was stifling.

“Doesn’ matter,” Ligur said. “I din’t come here to get comfortable.”

The ghost had not manifested herself yet. Ligur considered looking around. He’d still only been in the main sitting room of the house, and there was plenty more upstairs. But the spirit had always seemed to be content haunting him there, and it wasn’t as though either of them needed to think about the rest of her life anymore. Didn’t sound as though she’d had a particularly good one.

“That’s what I mean, though, isn’t it?” The demon peered up at the moldering ceiling of the place. “They always act as though we’re so bad. Like we’re the reason it’s all rotten.”

A gentle breeze blew through the empty space.

“Cause you know what I am, now, don’t you? I’m a demon. See. Not human at all.” He wiggled his fingers in the air. “Not like the rest of them. But it’s not _my_ fault your life sucked. I never even knew you. That’s just the way the world is. Life. Why I never much cared that I wasn’t in it.”

The ghost finally appeared. She stood before him, closer than usual. He could look directly into her black eyes.

Ligur nodded. “Yeah.”

She moved back a few paces, not actually walking, moving in a swift, jerking way. She ended with her back against the wall, arms held out at awkward angles, looking pinned there like some sort of dead butterfly. Her eyes stared wide and her mouth stretched.

Ligur grinned. “_Yeah_.”

She let go. She stood, calm, by the wall, and watched Ligur.

The demon nodded. He contemplated.

The ghost waited.

“_Now_ you see what I mean?” Ligur held out his arms. “You see what I’m saying? Life wasn’t nothing, was it? How long’ve you been here? A few centuries? Much longer than you were ever alive. And even those centuries, it doesn’t feel like long, does it?”

She tilted her head at him. He walked a few steps in one direction, then stopped. He stroked his chin. Looked back at her.

“But it also feels like _eternity_. That’s what you’ve got—forever. So quit your complaining ‘bout having a hard life or about me coming around messing with a few humans, what are humans anyway, just a few seconds on a dirt planet and then the rest of whenever in Heaven or Hell, and y’know, I don’t think it _really_ depends which, cause forever in Heaven has got to be just as boring as forever in Hell is torturous.” It felt good, this little blasphemy. Maybe that was why Crowley did it. He grinned wider. “And now you _see_ what I _mean_. It’s all nothing! All this, it’s nothing and it never _ends_. So you think it’s worthwhile trying to be good? Course not! It’s exhausting, and you’re _never finished_.”

He was pacing now. The ghost watched him, one end of the room to the other, never blinking.

“Not like being bad. You’re bad once, you’re bad forever, or you might as well be, anyway. Got some tarnish, not perfect, never good enough, all those things that’ll keep you out of ‘paradise’. Tryin’ to be good, you have to keep trying, and humans can’t do it for the short little durations of their piddly lives, so how’re you gonna do it once you don’t have to live anymore but you’re still _here_, still floating around watching it all happen and all coming to nothing, on and on and on?”

He stopped and fixed her with a look.

“I mean, d’you know what eternity is?” He frowned at the ground. “Because_ I_ certainly don’t. I haven’t lived it. _No_ one has. Oh, they complain, they wail about ‘an eternity of sufferin.’ That’s not really eternity. We don’t torture ‘em for eternity. We _stop_.”

He had once more picked up his pace, waving his arms around through the air as he went.

“Oh, we start again, eventually, maybe not even two seconds later, but it stops _sometimes_. I dunno what they do _then_, I don’t _watch_ them.” He shuddered. “I mean, I don’t know what they do _in between_. I’m not interested. But the point is, we don’t just keep going on and on forever and ever. We used to try that. Back when it first started. Y’know what happened? Ol’ Borgguh has a flaming head now. Jus’ walks around with it, like it don’t bother him no more, cause it _doesn’t_, cause it’s been that way for _so long_. We made him a dishonorary demon. He’d just been around forever, figured, might as well. Torturin’ him with the same thing till it din’t work no more, now he’s just—fine. And they complain, saying ‘Just when you think you can handle one thing, they make it worse!’ Don’t they know that’s good? Cause what else would they get if we never changed nothin’ at all?

“There’s some who _think_ we’re torturin’ ‘em for eternity. They think cause they have to do the same thing over and over it’s just constant torture and it’s workin’ and all, think they’re the same level of miserable as they have been since they started. You know Sisyphus?” Ligur snickered. “Crowley doesn’t think we keep up with human stuff, but stuff about _death?_ The afterlife? All their little underworld theories? Oh, I know _that_ stuff. I’ve seen some books that angel’d love to get his hands on.”

Ligur finally paused. Mentioning the angel felt—wrong. He tried to move on.

“So we’ve got this guy, right? Has to push a boulder up a hill, then it rolls down. Has to push it up again. Cause we tell him, if you get it up to the top, we’ll set you free! Whatever that means. Free to roam Hell, I guess. Well he’s still there, pushin’, tryin’ to get it to the top, but it’s _different_ now, you know? It couldn’t stay on forever. He wouldn’t keep trying that. Now he—he talks back. To the demons who yell at him to keep going. And he talks to other _humans_. Y’know all those stories bout humans going to Hell and they get toured around and shown the sights? All the different ways we’re gonna make them suffer? Yeah, _that_ was another good one, Hastur got hold of one of those manuscripts and we read it together and thought, ‘That’s it, exactly what Hell needs, the _tourism_ industry!’ Got a commendation for that one, we did. But this guy, he _talks_ to the humans, tells him his woes, warns them to turn back, to repent, not that its’ anything but too late for that, only he does it different every time. Changes it up. Always dramatic. I think he _likes_ it.”

Ligur shuddered again. Didn’t even know why. He glanced at the ghost, but she was still there, still just staring. Perhaps the cold got to him anyway.

“Humans are always changin’ things,” he complained. “They can never let anything be. Guess that helps them in the long run, when it comes to eternity, in Hell, anyway.” And then he stopped again, because anytime he mentioned anything about humans that might possibly help them instead of bringing them misery, he couldn’t help thinking that Crowley would see that as one of their positive qualities, and something about that made him nervous, too. “Anyway,” he said, “Nough of ‘Eternity.’ Eternity doesn’t exist. Cause it either ends, and it isn’t eternity, or it changes, and then it’s _still_ not the same thing going on endlessly, forever. Even in Hell. People think they’re as miserable as when they first got there, but they’re _not_. I was there, I know. They get _better_. They just don’t realize they are. Which is kind of terrifying, really. Not that I feel bad for them. But they _always_ get better eventually, and then we have to switch to doing somethin’ else. Which is _not_ forever. Eternity is fake. Things always end. So what’s the point?”

He felt both drained and good. He remembered what it had been like to use his meager ghostly power, fueled by all that rage and helplessness, meaninglessness, to haunt someone. To haunt Crowley, when he’d still been alive. To muster up the anger and strength to pick up something from the living world and throw it.

To blow out every single one of Hastur’s fires.

It felt exhausting, and energizing, at the same time. He grinned at the ghost.

She grinned back.

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. A bit in awe. “_You_ get it.”

The two of them stood there, silent, for a little while. Two beings, neither human, neither even needing to stand with their feet on the ground, but both of them anchored there anyway. Only for a while. They could never stay forever.

The ghost Elizabeth held both of her palms forward, open too wide to be inviting or asking for anything.

“They say you’re not buried in the cemetery,” Ligur said to her.

She shook her head. It wasn’t the way any human could move their heads.

“So, where are you?” Even though he knew where she was. She was here, now. No corpse was anything to her. He’d just felt like asking.

The ghost flickered. Then she flickered away. He saw her, though, outside the window across the room. The first he’d seen her go outside. It was a grey day, and he could still see her as she manifested past the walls.

Ligur followed her out, into the garden. Behind the house was even more overgrown and dead than the one in front. The ground was covered in dirt that was impossibly dry, scattered over Earth that was impossibly hard, packed down from centuries of nothing living having stepped there. Demon followed ghost as she flickered and fluttered down the path. Eventually, she made it to a tree. It was gnarled and black and looked as though it would bleed if you cut it. Ligur didn’t. The ghost hovered by it, the hem of her dress tangled in roots on the ground. Ligur looked down at it.

The Earth there was no different from the rest. There was no patch, no headstone, no rock left by someone who felt that there ought to be at least something to mark the place.

_I could dig her up_, he thought. Could find her bones. He shivered, not because of the reason humans were afraid of bones, the proof of the passage of time and the absence of life. For him, it was because if she had bones then she was once human also. He didn’t like to think about that, didn’t like to think of her having once been one of them, with a life and all of that.

He scuffed the ground with his foot. It came close to the hem of her dress. The ghost looked surprised, one of the few emotions she ever showed in her decayed state. The state that came from living in the empty plane beyond the veil that Ligur tried never to think about.

“That’s that, then,” he said. “Gone. So you don’t have to think about it anymore.”

The ghost stared at him. Then, she stared at him, different. He shrugged.

She flickered away.

He stared down at her burial site. It was shallow, really, the places humans thought of as being so deep. There was so much more, so much farther _Below_.

He put his hands in his pockets and went away.


	5. Chapter 5

The ghost chaser woman, Grimshaw, looked to be having a bad day. She normally did, with her iron expression and her short iron hair, and the way she sat like she had to use her strong arms to keep the table from floating away. Ligur suspected, though, that he knew why today she might be grumpy in particular.

He plopped down in the booth across from her with delight.

The woman huffed in way of greeting.

“Any luck with finding the lady’s bones?”

The woman huffed in way of negation.

“Right,” Ligur said. “Funny thing, humans, always trying to keep bones safe. Then you go and lose them anyway. You’re all so funny, you know?” He really didn’t mean it at all, but he chortled anyway.

Grimshaw refused to take the bait. Ligur was glad he hadn’t tried to steal her soul for his boss. Trying to anger her was like trying to set fire to an entire candle. She mumbled, “I’m sure if I can just find out where she’s buried, I can move her beside that Acton fellow, and all will be right.”

“I don’t think she’s sittin’ where her bones are. They’re not under the floorboards.”

“There’s more to the story.” Grimshaw still hadn’t looked at him. Ligur was beginning to appreciate her social habits more and more. She mumbled as she stared at her mug of whatever it was humans were drinking these days, “Elizabeth knew her first. That’s what started it. Acton was a writer, a poet, and she’d written him a letter sayin’ she was a fan. They wrote back and forth, Lizzie always signing her letters as ‘L.’ For propriety. Still, he found her out, and came to visit her, to ask her to marry ‘im.”

“Mm,” Ligur said. He thought about knocking over her mug, but that was more the kind of thing a low imp would do, and he’d moved up—or, in Hell’s case, down—enough in his job to not sink—or rise—to that level.

“But when he showed up,” Grimshaw continued, “Miss Laetitia met him at the door instead. Didn’t even know him. Just heard he was in love, and said she was the one who’d written him all the letters. Name started with ‘L’, after all.”

“Too many ‘L’s,” Ligur said. “_Fascinatin’_ story.”

“After they were married, Lizzie still had to live with them.” For once, there was something other than pure business in the woman’s expression. A small fire. “Never got married herself. Died just a year later. No known cause. People didn’t investigate in those days.”

Grimshaw shivered. Then she sat up straight. Her face was back to normal. “And now she’s not even buried with them. Not with her family, nor with the man she loved. I’ve moved her sister’s bones already. To the family lot, still. No use layin’ to rest one ghost only to dig up another. But away from Acton’s. I could reunite Miss Lizzie with him, if only I could _find_ her.”

“People’d stop getting hurt,” Ligur said. “If people would just leave the house alone. It’s not like the ghost is going to go after anyone. Everyone she ever knew’s dead now.”

“Of course. Ghosts can never leave their place of haunting.”

“Psh.”

Grimshaw stared at him from under harsh eyebrows.

“That’s not true,” Ligur said, simply.

The woman considered him. “You seem to know a lot about ghosts. And you say you’re not a spiritualist yourself?”

“I am _definitely_ not.” He couldn’t help but say, however, “Listen, ghosts can go anywhere they like. The only thing stopping ‘em’s boredom. Fact is, the world’s not much worth lookin’ at once you’re dead. You realize that. All that stuff out there, all those other humans, an’ you might as well stay in your own miserable dump of a house. None of it’s worth a jot more.” That’s what that other ghost had said, the one they’d met in the Next Place. There was what Crowley had said, too. The bookshop had been ‘brighter’ for him. Ligur hadn’t found a place that was brighter for him. Maybe that was why he’d wandered so much.

“Now, I haven’t been everywhere,” Grimshaw said after a moment. “Only in Europe, really, but there, I’ve been all over the continent. It’s not as though I’m making friends around every corner. I wouldn’t say I’m one of those _‘live life to the fullest’_ types. Not exactly sunshine and roses, me. But if I were dead, and could go anywhere, I wouldn’t stay put in one place.”

“Oh, I’d wander,” Ligur said, thinking of his cross-country wanderings with Crowley in their attempt to find their way back home. “Only for lack of anythin’ else to do. Maybe that’s the problem with you people and the ghosts you make. You think there’s somethin’ important for you back where you came from. ‘Home’. You’re afraid to wander too far from it, like it matters.”

Grimshaw frowned. Then, her face smoothed out, almost, even with its deep-set wrinkles. She whispered, “That’s it. That must be it.”

“Course it is. I’m smart, y’see.”

“That’s why she can’t leave,” Grimshaw said. “Why she can’t let anyone else have her house. She’s buried there somewhere.”

Ligur scowled.

Grimshaw took a swig from her mug, put it down decisively, and stood up. “I don’t know who you are, young—”

She frowned at him again. Ligur sneered back up at her.

“—young—er—nevermind. But, don’t you worry.” She slapped her hand on the table before turning to go. “I’ll have this sorted soon, and you won’t have to see my face anymore.”

She smiled at him before she left. Ligur grimaced at her. Then he changed his mind, and gave her a very nasty sort of smirk, but she had already walked out the door.

Ligur walked into the haunted house.

A phantom rushed towards him in a gust of cold rage and screamed.

“_Aaaaaaaeeeeeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiii!_”

“What’re you screaming for, you daft git? It’s me!”

The ghost hung silent in the air. She stared at him with black eyes. Ligur waved her off.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Nobody can make you do anythin’. Not even that—that _person_.” He wasn’t sure Z was a person, really. He’d always thought _he_ hadn’t been, but compared to _them_, he was practically human. More and more reason to hate them.

Ligur lurked in the shadows. The whole house was shadows. The ghost was a part of them. She lurked with him.

“See—that angel.” Ligur sniffed. “Or nonangel or whatever it is floating around here. One who calls themself ‘Zee’. Or ‘Zzz.’ Fitting name, they _are_ a snooze.” _They’re a nightmare_, Ligur thought dimly. “They think, when you end up in that place, the Next Place, ‘Why does it matter that you’re here? It’s not forever. In the grand scheme of things, you’ll only be here for a blink of an eye, so what are you so upset about? You’ll see him again. From _my_ perspective, it’ll be soon.’”

Ligur was chewing on something, his thoughts or his anger or his own teeth, or whatever it was that had built up in the back of his throat ever since that day that he’d woken up dead. No more.

He spit.

He turned and said, angrily, “But the thing is—the thing was, we were there, _now_. It was awful _now_. In that empty, nothing place. So we got them to send us back. So now, I’m _here_ now.”

He looked at the ghost, and for once, he didn’t say to her what he was thinking. What he was thinking was, _Talking to you, instead of doing what I thought I was so desperate to get back to_.

“That’s what I always used to sneer at, those sniveling humans, complaining about pain, like it wasn’t _nothing_. It’s all _nothing_. You’re gonna last forever, so who cares if I’m hurting you now? Eventually I’ll stop, and who cares about that either? What does it _matter?_”

He held out a hand palm-up, and tilted his head up to the sky, a gesture of tragedy he’d seen people use. “So this human soul is in agony, so Lucifer got angry and hurt me again, so thousands of years ago we fell into a _pit_ of _fire_. _Who cares?_ We’re gonna be here _forever_, so what’s the point? ‘Happiness?’ I’ve seen that and it ends. Pain? It ends too. But we just go on and on, over and over, so what’s the _point?_”

Ligur, Duke of Hell, stared at the ceiling, and found he didn’t want to be looking up. He stared at the ground, and that didn’t help either. He tried his best to look at nothing, but that had always been too hard. It was why that place, filled with nothing, had been so maddening.

“Humans think there are ends to things. So they think there _is_ a point. A means to an end, they say. Something to aim for. Something worth saving. Like Crowley, with the whole bloody—” He stopped, chewed again. Didn’t spit this time. “They think there’s an end that can _end up_ being ‘the way things are’, happy or sad, something that is the _point_, and honestly that terrifies me.” There was so much to mess up that way. And because of that, until very recently, he had never thought there might be a silver lining to ‘things mattering.’

“But,” he said. His voice had gone soft. He’d only heard it like that, very, very rarely. It hurt. “We were in that place—that place you’re in—and everything mattered even less. I thought I already didn’t care, but there, there was even less to care about. I’m just floating around in emptiness for eternity. And Z says, ‘Eventually, eventually it’ll be fine,’ but I’m angry _now_, I’m scared _now_, I’m sad _now_ and—bloody hell, I hadn’t been sad in ages—and I hadn’t thought that ‘now’ mattered for anybody, cause nothing matters, cause you’ve got eternity for things to change, but maybe eternity isn’t real and you can’t feel it anyway, but you can _feel_ ‘now’ and maybe if you don’t really have eternity after all then maybe ‘now’ is the only thing that really m—”

He stopped, and he wasn’t choking on anything. He wasn’t feeling anything. It had all vanished. It always did. Or he did. He could never stop being a ghost. He’d never been anything else.

After a moment, he squinted up at the grey lady floating above him.

“You just floated there and listened to me talk for a _real_ long time.” He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes at her. “I’m sure you didn’t _enjoy_ it. At least, I hope you didn’t. Good. Don’t think just cause we’re on friendlier terms I’m gonna start being _pleasant company_. I’m not nice to people just cause I don’t hate them. I’m not nice to Hastur.”

That was a lie, and it made him feel queasy.

He stared at her. She stared back at him. He felt on the verge of something. He felt, and this was the reason he liked being here so much, like there was no verge to anything at all. Nothing he said here mattered in the slightest. _No one_ was listening. She was, but she was no one. No one and no one, and nothing, and—

He heard the sound of the creaking front door opening.

Ligur thought he might turn into a monstrous beast that humans feared demons were.

“Get out,” he said, storming into the entrance hall where Grimshaw stood, eying him speculatively. “Get out, _get out_.”

“I believe that’s what the specter’s usually meant to say,” she commented.

Ligur hadn’t even said goodbye to her. He knew she’d be gone now. He scowled at the woman.

“But you’d know better than me.” Grimshaw raised an eyebrow at him. “Wouldn’t you?”

He said nothing.

“You obviously have something to do with that ghost,” she said brusquely. “I didn’t know why you were here at first. Still don’t, I s’pose. But I have never—never—seen a ghost behave the way she does around you._ I_ _saw her standing there, listening to you_.”

Ligur could have made a snide remark about pitying her that nobody ever listened to her. He could have turned into something horrible and frightened her away. He just sulked.

Grimshaw did something terrible, and made him regret it. She put her hands on his shoulders.

“You can help me put her to rest!” she said. Her eyes were bright. “That is the decent thing to do!”

Ligur shook himself out of her grasp.

She looked disgusted. “Don’t you have a care for any being but yourself?”

“No, and not that one either.”

She scoffed. “Well, I’m going to help her and this town, with your help or without it.”

She went to march around him, and he followed.

“You can’t _put_ her to _rest_,” Ligur said. “That’s not real! There is no rest, only death, and you don’t even have the power to do that, none of us has the power to do that.” He thought, _Only Z, and they’re not even paying attention. Otherwise she wouldn’t even be allowed this._

Grimshaw paid him no mind.

“She’s not going to become nice just because you move her bones around.” He hated the panicked edge to his own voice. “You can’t fix her life and you can’t fix her.”

“I’ve done this loads before. Sent plenty of spirits to rest in my long life.”

That couldn’t be true. Ligur knew how ghosts work, and he knew that couldn’t be true. He frowned, his brow wrinkled, contemplating. Then he understood.

He felt relief wash through him instantly.

“Oh, _really?_” he sneered.

Grimshaw didn’t even turn around. She was actually inspecting the floorboards. Humans were so stupid. How could he have let himself forget that they were _so_ _stupid?_ What a relief it was, what a pity he hadn’t thought of it sooner.

“You’ve never even seen one before, have you?”

Grimshaw ‘pshaw’ed.

“I bet you’ve just been chasing rumors.” Ligur grinned like a jack-o-lantern. “Just following ghost stories, not real ones. And when they don’t turn out to be true, you think you’ve exorcised somebody, and you congratulate yourself on havin’ saved the whole world. It won’t work this time. She’s really _real_.”

“Give me a hand, or don’t. I don’t need your nattering.”

“You can’t do a thing.” Ligur was utterly convinced of it. How stupid he’d been. What point was there in fearing anything, when you knew how powerless you were, and everyone else, too? Nothing _mattered_. “I’ll show you.”

Grimshaw snorted. Then she seemed to hear his words. She stopped poking about the floorboards and stood up. “You’ll what?”

“Show you. Where she was buried.”

Grimshaw raised her eyebrows. Ligur snorted. She said, “And how would you know that?”

“She showed me.”

The woman slowly lowered her eyebrows. Her shoulders dropped from their aggravated elevation. Her face became calm. “Take me.”

Ligur nodded. He turned and started walking. Grimshaw followed.

Ligur took her outside. He took her to the patch of dirt. The one that wasn’t really a patch. Nothing to mark it at all.

Grimshaw looked at it. Nodded. Then turned around and marched back to the house.

Ligur followed her. Grimshaw continued her marching through the house. She marched all the way out the door.

Ligur, reluctant to leave, shouted after her, one hand holding on to the door frame. “Where are you going?”

“To get my good boots,” the woman shouted gruffly, without even turning back to face him. “I’ve got digging to do.”


	6. Chapter 6

Ligur went back to the house the next day. It had gotten warmer inside, though the air outside was still cold. The house felt empty.

He’d walked out to the back garden.

He’d seen the grave, dug up and refilled again, and he’d walked back through the house. He didn’t stay to wait for the ghost. He simply left.

Later, he went by the old graveyard. The husband, Acton’s grave had been dug up and refilled, as well. It had been expertly done. Only someone who expected it would have noticed. No one could prove it. The edges of the soil almost matched the rest of the cemetery. The ground was almost as solid and dead as it had been before.

A few days later was Halloween. The village seemed on edge about whether or not it should celebrate it. There was a Jack-O-Lantern here and there. Some kids running around in the street seemed to have the crazed energy boiling within them that signaled that something was special about today, but nobody else seemed excited. They seemed nervous, but then, in that village, the people always did.

Ligur was finally going back to the old house. He hadn’t gone anywhere else. He’d lurked in the shadows, doing nothing, unnoticed, for days. And nights. He could lurk because he had been a demon. He could do nothing because he’d once been dead.

He was heading towards the winding, uphill path that led to the house, but there was something at the base of it. Near the bottom of the hill, in the mud of the village’s rarely-used road, there was a carriage. No, a car. That’s what they called it these days. Not like the one the serpent had. This one was uglier. A few people were gathered around it.

Ligur lurked and skulked and slunk over to them, and then he got a feeling, not a good one, just the type demons sometimes got. A bad one. He stood up and didn’t bother trying to hide anymore. He walked over to them.

The three lurkers from the pub, two humans who would probably make fine dishonorary demons someday, and one who was teetering on the edge, all gathered around the car. The edge one was speaking to another human Ligur hadn’t seen in the town before.

“She just—wouldn’t leave,” she said. She sounded close to tears.

“We tried to tell her,” grumbled one of the others.

“Wouldn’t listen.”

“Had it comin’.”

The new human with the ugly car looked perturbed. “Really, miss. You’ve all told us your village’s stories, but—isn’t there anything else you noticed? Anyone acting strangely? Anything at all? Seen any other strangers around?”

Ligur walked past the man and woman. Neither looked at him. He didn’t look at them, either.

“After all,” the man said, thoughtful. “It could have been an accident. That slope is pretty steep. She wasn’t young. It would have been easy to slip.”

“Anyone who goes up there dies,” the woman said. She sounded on the verge of hysteria. “_Anyone_.”

“It seems most likely that it was an accident,” the man said, vaguely. “A coincidence. There’s no need to stir up the whole village. Don’t want to make a big deal.”

“It’s always the same,” said one of the gloomy figures.

“They’ll never learn.”

“Serves ‘em right.”

Ligur walked around the car. He started up the hill. The muddy side was especially slick. He tramped on, and it took him quite some time before he was far enough away to no longer hear the people standing by the car. The air became as quiet as the dead. It was still. Only the sound of Ligur’s shoes squelching through the mud, thick silences in between each step.

He reached the gate and pushed it open. The plants looked more brittle today than ever. He marched through the garden and reached the house.

The door was already open. Ligur kicked it out of his way anyway. He walked into the entrance chamber and stood there, hands shoved in his pockets, head tilted a little to one side.

Dust barely drifted in the air around him.

Ligur didn’t go into the downstairs sitting room. He gave the stairs a contemplative look. Then he marched up them.

At the top of the stairs was another hall with entrances to several rooms. The right one was obvious. The doorway seemed to tilt, alter, pulse with unknown energy when you looked at it. There were footprints in the dusty floor leading into it.

Ligur walked into a bedroom.

The place was even more crowded with things than the sitting room before. The place felt full, of abandonment, of loss, of answers. It felt completely empty. There were so many clues scattered around it everywhere. It was grey and lifeless and Ligur did not look at any of them.

The only thing that caught his eye was a musicbox, like the one that had been downstairs, in fact it might have been the very same one. It sat on the small table by the head of the bed. Ligur walked over to it, spun the figures, and let them go.

Music played for only a second before the ghost appeared. As soon as she did, peering at him with her black eyes, Ligur grabbed the figures and stopped it.

They looked at each other.

The ghost said nothing, ever.

“She helped you,” Ligur said.

A low moan was starting to build, like a stormy wind through a forest. First it blew through all the house, and then Ligur realized it was coming from the woman. He gave her a look, and the sound stopped.

He shook his head. “She put you _right_.”

A small crack appeared in the woman’s face. She tilted her head at him.

The Duke of Hell took a few steps, not quite towards her, but to the side. It was like he hadn’t moved at all. The specter still faced him.

“All your stupid _problems_,” Ligur shouted. It was so sudden that it startled himself. “The things that _mattered_ to you, that made you _kill_ people, _murder_. She fixed them!”

There was not a single expression on the ghost’s face. Ligur wondered if it was because she was dead. And then he remembered that he had been, too.

He sneered at her. “I don’t like you much.”

She stared.

“Not that I ever much _like_ anybody,” Ligur said. _Except Hastur_, whispered the hideous traitor voice inside his head. He gave one of his best ugly sniffs. “Just that the way I dislike _you_ isn’t much _fun_ anymore.”

He took a few steps towards her. She did nothing.

He put a hand on her arm. She was insubstantial, but he could feel her. He could always feel humans, wherever they were, no matter how little he tried. It was part of a demon’s job. Always feel where they were, in Hell, on Earth. It was why he could grab her arm now, even though she was dead, and why he’d walked right past the cloth-covered thing near the car, which had been nothing, not human anymore.

The ghost did nothing. Ligur pressed his teeth together, bared them, stretched his face out wide. He realized, technically, this was a grin. He let it become a real one.

“All right,” he said. “Time to stop.”

For once, the spectral woman responded. She had an expression, like one of haughty surprise. One eyebrow slightly raised. A slight fire in her black eyes.

“Oh, you don’t think I can?” Ligur smirked. “Do you want to see? Because, after all, aren’t you _bored?_”

The ghost eyes went back to black. The woman tried to back away. Tried to move her arm. Ligur tightened his grip.

“Now, _my dear friend Crowley_—” he said with a sneer, “would say that humans are more impressive by far than anything I could ever be. He’d say that you lot have achieved more with your puny lives than us demons could even dream of. Soppy git.”

He snorted. The woman tried harder to move away. He grabbed her other arm in his hand.

“But I don’t believe him. See, you might be more advanced than me. You’re what came after. What’s _next_. I remember, humans, all new and squeaky clean.” He let himself remember, for the first time. The world had seemed so big then. The world he’d seen back then seemed so small, compared to how it was now. That surprised him. He said, “Everyone was so excited. What about us, left to rot?”

The ghost had a wicked look to her. She really was a rotten one, Ligur thought. He grinned. She cackled. He held her so tightly his fingers hurt.

“Well, not exactly,” he said.

Wind blew through the house from nowhere. The fire was back in the woman’s eyes. Ligur gritted his teeth. His voice raised when he said, “You might be what comes next, but I was here _first_. I’m what came_ before._ And I know every bit and piece you’re made of.”

The ghost was baring her own teeth at him now, her hair whipping in the wind she had made, her face cracked and broken, pure rage. It was nothing. Ligur had seen worse. No matter what people did, he’d always have seen worse. It was hard to leave him shaken.

“_Ghosts versus_ _demons_,” he spat. He laughed. “Ghosts are only demons without the flair!”

The ghost was screaming now. The house was in chaos. Her rage was almost palpable, a bitter tang in the air, and the noise was almost deafening. It was impossible not to notice.

Ligur, who lurked hidden in the shadows of the whole world, had counted on drawing notice.

A golden light had appeared. At first, it came from behind the ghost’s head, and it almost looked as though she had a halo. But then it grew bigger in size. It lit up the whole room, casting out the grey with gold. Ligur heard wings.

The ghost was not paying any attention to him now. She screamed, but she had closed her eyes. She was being tugged away from him, and as she pulled her arms, trying to cover her face with her hands, Ligur realized he was still holding on to her. He let go.

The golden light grew warmer and encompassed the ghost, and Ligur felt it, and remembered that he was so, so afraid. The light didn’t touch him, but he could feel it, and it felt like it meant him no harm at all. That made it all so much worse.

But the ghost stopped screaming. She had vanished away. The golden light started to diminish. It sucked the ghost’s tantrum wind away with it into nothingness, into whatever comes next. It flashed out into darkness, and the house was left empty.

Ligur stood, staring at the wall.

Ligur left the village.

The world was a very big place. There had never seemed much need for it to be so big. He would wander through it, sometimes, and get overwhelmed how very much there was of everything, and how very little of it seemed to be what the humans in Hell ever remembered. Then again, they were in Hell. Maybe that was the problem.

When Ligur had died, he’d seen the floor of Crowley’s flat, and then he’d seen nothing. Blink, the outside streets of Mayfair, blink, nothing. He knew this wasn’t what humans saw when they died, at least not normally. First they saw Death. Then they saw—wherever they went next. He’d certainly never volunteered to be one of Hell’s greeting crew.

He wondered what she had seen, that old woman, the ghost chaser. He didn’t know if she’d go to Heaven, or if she’d end up in Hell. He vowed to himself, never, ever to check.*

*’Never ever’ never happened to demons, or angels. Neither, for that matter, did ‘Always’. Eternity was just too long for that. It was why Ligur had always thought promises were so ridiculous that even an angel should be able to see the absurdity of it all.

Ligur wandered around the Earth, feeling very alone, which he always was, and had never really felt, until recently. Or maybe he’d been feeling it forever. There had to be something, he supposed, in that tight, coiled, withering, decaying whatever-it-was that made up the inside of him. Had to have been all this time.

Z had sent Crowley back first.

Ligur flinched at the memory, but this time, he let it play. He stood on the Earth in no place important and let it play.

Z had sent Crowley back first.

Ligur had watched as they put their finger to his forehead, and the demon’s eyes had grown less frightened, and then closed. There was a light growing through the two of them. And then, just before he had vanished, he’d had a look on his face that Ligur had never seen there before, one he hadn’t thought he’d care to see. But after all they’d been through, all that terror, Crowley had looked completely at peace, and it made Ligur feel something inside, something that made him think he cared too much for that blasted traitor.

Then he was gone.

And Ligur was alone. Utterly alone. Again.

_ How many times?_

Then Z had turned to him, with that unnerving smile. And Ligur didn’t trust them, because Ligur didn’t trust anybody. He was terrified. But they had already sent away Crowley.

Z stepped toward him and, instead of putting their finger to his forehead right away, like they had with Crowley, they reached with their right hand first and held his face up by his chin. Ligur closed his eyes and didn’t like to think of what his face might have looked like.

He hadn’t felt Z’s finger touch him.

He’d woken up in a field.

Ligur walked, numb, and although he had never been drawn to the Earth, had never known where to go when he’d been forced to wander it as an alternative to nothingness while he’d been banished to the Next Place, now he felt the inevitable spiral of a magnet pulling him towards Mayfair.

He ended up at Crowley’s flat.

He hadn’t bothered with the locks, or doorbells, or anything, he’d just gone to the door. This time he knocked. Didn’t even know why.

Crowley opened the door. Ligur pushed him aside, a bit slower than usual, and walked in. Crowley stared, mouth agape, as the demon invaded his flat, and Crowley didn’t do a thing to stop him, because he was a coward, or he was stupid, or he was stupidly brave, which was both, or neither. Trying to decide what people were was a mess. No one should ever have tried to do it.

“What’s wrong?” Crowley said, instead of ‘What the hell are you doing?’, and Ligur could have punched him.

Ligur turned around and glared at him. It was a sharp glare, more pointed than he usually gave. Crowley didn’t look intimidated. He closed the door behind him and turned back to face Ligur, giving the duke a strange, contemplative look. Or maybe he looked concerned. Or maybe he looked afraid. Not of him, though. Scared of something, but like he didn’t know what. Demons never did.

Ligur sniffed.

“What’s going on?” Crowley asked.

Ligur glowered at him.

“Ligur?”

The demon felt sickness. He felt every conflict of existence boiling inside of him. He stared at the snake, thinking, _I want to throw up, I want to throw up, I want to throw up_.

He cried instead.

Crowley looked petrified, in a gratifying way. And then, in a way that was much more gratifying, embarrassingly so, he didn’t anymore.

“F—sh—Ligur.”

Ligur cried. Crowley faltered. He held out an arm. Ligur, bafflingly, walked towards it. The serpent grabbed the back of his coat, and without knowing how, Ligur ended up falling against him, face bashing into his shoulder, the serpent wrapping him in his arms, shuddering duke of nothing.

The snake held him. Crowley was absolutely silent. Ligur, crying, thought, _I want to throw up_, and kept crying anyway.

Crowley didn’t even pat him on the back. Just stayed still. Ligur sobbed.

‘_S’easier to bear_, he thought, his own thoughts rugged, like his sobbing, _maybe,_ _‘f tears are the puke of, say, your emotions, or somethin’_.

And then he started laughing into the serpent’s shoulder.

Crowley pushed him off, looking disgusted, but not near enough, which was somehow good. Ligur snorted and backed away from him. He wiped his face noisily across his whole sleeve.

“You can’t—” Crowley said, awkward. “You’re not—you can’t be done yet. You don’t have to—you know. You don’t have to bottle it up forever. It’s okay.”

Ligur snorted so loudly that he hurt himself. “I can’t _let it all out_, demon,” he said. He rubbed his whole arm across his face. “Know you think it’s _healthy_, an’ all that, but it’s not going to happen. I’d be sittin’ here for days.” His voice was only a little squeaky. He tried not to look embarrassed. “Y’know how you gotta open soda bottles a little at a time to let out all the fizz, or else you’ll have a great bloody mess?”

Crowley nodded. “I’ve shaken up my fair share of soda bottles,” he admitted, almost proud.

“Is that what you do for—Satan, you’re path—you’re—I mean.” Ligur sighed. “_Thank you_.” He said, “But I’m not gonna sit here and get cured. S’been _six thousand years_, Crowley.”

The serpent nodded, still reluctant, which was reassuring, in a way. “So—you’re a soda bottle?”

Ligur laughed and hiccupped, nodding.

Crowley sighed. “All right. Well, you’ll rot peoples’ teeth, at least. Guessing you don’t want to talk about it?”

Ligur sort of smiled at him.

Crowley frowned. He cleared his throat, and said, “I mean, do you _want_ to—”

“_There_ he is!” Ligur laughed. He realized he hadn’t in a while. “Good to know you’re still you, serpent, even if you’re an idiot. No I do not want to ‘talk about it’. Nice of you to ask.”

“Well, I—”

“That’s not a compliment.”

“Yes it is,” Crowley said with a smirk.

Ligur grimaced. His face finally felt right again. He beamed in as grimacey a way as he could. “Shutit.”

“Get out of here, Duke Lizard,” Crowley said. “The last time you popped by, you messed me up. I started bantering like this with Aziraphale. I called him a sappy git, and he looked like I’d slapped him in the face.”

“_Ha_—”

“_And you know better than anyone_,” Crowley said, towering over him suddenly, “_what I would do to anyone who, directly or indirectly, _hurt_ Aziraphale_.”

Ligur shrank back, his statement that he had managed to torture the angel after all from a distance dying on his tongue. He gave a little wave. “I’ll just be off, then. Say ‘hi’ to your sappy git for me.”

“Will do. Say hello to your monstrous nightmare.”

“I most definitely will not do that. Later, snake.”

Crowley gave him an odd look. Ligur supposed _he_ probably looked pretty odd. He didn’t have the heart to hate him for it, then. There would be plenty of time to piss off the serpent later.

He gave him a little wave, again, for no reason, or maybe for some reason, whichever, and turned, and left.

Crowley watched after him.

Ligur walked down the street of Mayfair. Then he walked in an entirely other direction, one no human could walk, at least not visibly.

He went to Hell.

It wasn’t such a bad thing as it sounded, for a demon.


	7. Chapter 7

Hastur saw Ligur as he approached, and it filled him with a painful and paralyzing sensation, like there were knives lying dormant under his skin, threatening to burst their way out. He felt like that far too often, these days. Dormant knives. He’d never felt dormant before.

“I’ve been looking for you,” he said, forcing himself to call it out, across the distance. It was an admittance of fairly high caliber for him, compared to the usual accusatory ‘Where have you been?’ he would have stuck with before. One that went apparently unnoticed, since Ligur just kept staring at him with that impenetrable smirk, hands in his pockets.

“Well, here I am, you loathsome bastard.”

Hastur didn’t know what to say to that. He went on, “Almost Halloween, your—your specialty, and you’re nowhere to be found. You lo—you liked to come up with the most spectacular plans. I thought you were going to tell me all about them now. I mean, you always did, but I thought, now, especially—”

Ligur sniffed. “Now _what?_”

Hastur parted his lips a little and took in a sharp breath, peering back at him at an absolute loss.

“D’you know—” Ligur said. He looked down and shuffled his foot on the ground a little. Hastur knew Ligur’s various hunches—one where he was angry, shoulders tight together, or one where he was just annoyed, more rounded than usual, or one where he had a brilliant plan and he was unafraid and excited and proud, where even as he hunched himself over, he looked _bigger_—but this one, one shoulder above the other, an almost tottery quality to it, this one he had never seen before. “D’you know,” Ligur said, “that thing I do sometimes, to lost souls, with the fire? Most of those are yours, but after watchin’ you for a while I got a few ideas. You put the flame closer and closer to ‘em, but in between, you take it away. Each time you take it away. An’ they always think, stupid little buggers, they always think maybe it’s over. Maybe that last time really was the worst it was goin’ to get. That’s the worst in it, that thought that that really was the end of it last time, that that was the worst and they’ve gotten through it and finished now. But the flame always comes back again, always worse. Sorta—slow burn.”

He stopped, and Hastur waited, utterly baffled.

“I think,” Ligur went on, “denial might be the kinda hole you fall back in. You spend all that time climbin’ out, an’ then you think, ‘All right, good on me, I made it’, so you sit back and relax and don’t even see yourself slidin’ back in again. I’ve seen that angel do it, while I was watchin’, before. He’d say somethin’ nice and think, ‘There, I’ve done it, he _knows_ now’, only Crowley really didn’t know at all, and the point is, Hastur, I think I need you to _say_ it, because—”

“I was _worried_ about you,” Hastur interrupted, because it was the only thing he could say. Because he couldn’t possibly say anything else but maybe it would be enough. He could only hope that maybe, Ligur, after he’d been transmogrified by that serpent, into something unrecognizable, yet something still unbearably _him_—maybe that unfathomable new _understanding_ in him would make him understand. He said, “To the death.”

“You were _worried_ about me?” Ligur replied in that delighted, soft voice Hastur still wasn’t used to hearing come out of his mouth. “You daft old sod.”

Hastur gave a rickety sigh. “Just—come home, Ligur.”

“_Home?_”

Hastur held out a hand and looked as much in his direction as he possibly could. Ligur dithered for a moment.

Then he crossed over to him, and took it.

The two of them started to walk away.

Hastur tried to think, but found he couldn’t. There was just that boiling something beneath him, behind him, threatening to overtake him. It wasn’t like that usual demon fear. This was something new.

After a few seconds, Ligur stopped them, and they both looked at their hands. Hastur saw with something almost approaching gratitude that Ligur’s face was twisted in discomfort.

“Y’know—maybe not,” Ligur said, letting go, and they both took some steps away from each other in relief.

But then they kept walking in the same direction, still technically, if you were being generous, side by side.

Hastur clenched the fingers of his freed hand into a fist. “Hmm,” he said, thoughtful. “‘A slow burn’. I’ll have to remember that.”

“Don’t you go takin’ credit for somethin’ I came up with.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”


	8. Epilogue

Grimshaw opened her eyes.

No. That wasn’t right. She could see. She hadn’t opened anything. There was nothing to—

Ah.

When the golden figure appeared before her, she nodded at them.

“Death, I presume?” she said.

“Not exactly.” Z smiled.

They had a crooked smile. Grimshaw liked it.

“However,” Z said, “you are dead. I am sorry for your loss.” They said it like they were trying the words out, like they were something new. Then, with more certainty, “But everything will be all right.”

Grimshaw nodded again. “Right,” she said. “Well, then. What’s next?”

Z told Grimshaw her options. She took no time in making up her mind.

“I’ve put plenty of souls to rest,” she said. “Lived a long life. Some good, some bad. Plenty hard. I’m tired.”

Z smiled again, and told her to follow.

“So, you’ve put souls to rest?” Z said. They seemed amused by this. Grimshaw had plenty of experience with people being amused by her life’s work. She was unbothered. Z said, “Would you like to see them?”

They stood, or pretended to stand—this place was far too complicated, and Grimshaw would be glad to close her eyes to it, soon—and looked out among the resting spirits.

Grimshaw could not, of course, actually see them. But she knew they were there. The girl she had helped in Armenia. The man who’d had unfinished business in France. All of them, the spirits—people—she’d helped while she was still in the living world. They slept, at peace.

Grimshaw smiled.

“All right,” she said, turning to Z. “I’m ready.”

Z smiled, too, and raised a hand to her forehead. They said, “All right. Sleep well. I’ll see you again, soon.”


End file.
